Page 38 of Fifty-Fifty

Harper left the table with the papers I’d handed over. I took my time watching her leave. There was a playful side to Harper that I was only just getting to know. Through the large windows at Blooms, I watched her cross the street. The

crosswalk was crowded, and I saw a woman in black jogging Lycra and a baseball hat walking behind her. The woman wore a skull cap, or something like

that, beneath the cap, because I couldn’t tell the color of her hair. As Harper got to the other side of the street, the jogger turned and ran in the other direction.

Probably a different jogger, or maybe someone doing laps of the same block, at worst. I pushed the jogger out of my mind again – I really was beginning to

sound paranoid.

My mind wandered and I thought again about the autopsy report. I thought for a second I had realized what was bothering me about it. Then, as quickly as it came, the thought vanished. I tried calling Sofia but she didn’t pick up. I left a message asking her to call me. Just as I was taking the steps down to the subway my phone rang.

‘Mr. Flynn, sorry I missed your call. What’s happened?’

It was Sofia. She sounded rattled – out of breath.

‘It’s okay. Nothing too major but we need to talk. You sound breathless, are you alright?’

‘Yes, I’m fine.’

‘Oh, good. Can we meet?’

‘Sure. Around five o’clock? I have a few errands to run.’

TWELVE

KATE

In the ladies’ bathroom on the fourteenth floor of the building that housed Levy, Bernard and Groff, Kate tucked the collar of her blouse beneath the lapels of her jacket. It was coming up on two o’clock in the afternoon and she hadn’t eaten since breakfast. She was hungry, but too focused to stop for food.

Checked her reflection.

She hit the faucet, washed and dried her hands.

Checked her reflection again. She touched up her lipstick. Breathed out, nodded and left.

Kate made her way to the conference room, which had been commandeered for the attorneys working on the Avellino case. Levy had described this as the ‘war room’ and sure enough a battle was raging when Kate opened the door.

A long table filled with open law books, case reports, laptops, coffee cups, legal pads and pencils took up the center of the room. The group had been working all morning, discussing the discovery and potential strategies. They had to be ready to present their ideas to Levy the next morning. Levy let it be known, none too subtly, that whoever had the best work would likely be awarded second

chair at the trial. Kate wanted that seat more than anything. This was her moment, and she wasn’t going to let it pass. All the shit that came with the job would be worth it if she was sitting beside Levy in that trial. It was all that she could think about. The group in the room already had a head start as Kate had missed the morning session. She had now read the discovery and was up to speed. It didn’t pass her by that Levy had deliberately kept her out of the office by giving her the morning off to collect her thoughts. While this put her behind in terms of work, seeing Bloch and her dad that morning had been exactly what

she’d needed.

Around the table sat Scott, an empty chair beside him to which Kate returned, and on the other side of the room were three attorneys from litigation who had

previously worked in the criminal department. All of them were male, all wore

expensive suits that looked too tight and ties that were way too thin. They had given their names to Kate as Chad, Brad and Anderson. They didn’t offer to shake hands, but one of them, Brad, hit Scott with a fist bump. She didn’t know if Anderson was a first name or last name. It didn’t matter. Brad, Chad and Anderson looked as though they shared the same bleached-blond personality.

Jocks with rich parents and trust funds.

Kate returned to the stack of papers in front of her – a potted history of the Avellino family with more details on Alexandra and Sofia. The more Kate read,

the more she was convinced that Alexandra was the functioning, organized sibling who had her shit together and her life on track from a young age. While Sofia was a disaster with bouts of drug addition, rehab stints, counseling and more than one intervention regarding her destructive behavior. It made Kate feel good to know that she was obviously representing the innocent sister, but with that knowledge came weight.

The burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt lay with the prosecution, but the burden of having an innocent client on trial for murder was a much heavier one.

Innocence weighs a ton.